Every city of any ambition has run one of these programs.
The format is familiar. A cohort of twenty, thirty, forty rising professionals. Monthly sessions over an academic year. Tours of city hall, the water treatment plant, the hospital, the school district, the transit authority, the police department.
Lunch with the mayor. A retreat somewhere with ropes courses and “trust exercises.” A graduation ceremony with a keynote address from someone of community importance.
The instinct behind these programs was genuine. Civic life is complicated, and informed participants make better communities.
That part has always been true.
Who Gets In
What’s also true is who got in.
The selection process, in most cities, ran through chambers of commerce, corporate human resources departments, law firm managing partners, and non-profit administrators.
Employers nominated their promising people. Employers paid the tuition. Employers expected a return on that investment in the form of a more civically connected and networked employee who would reflect well on the organization.
I went through one of these programs. I know what it felt like from the inside. The genuine excitement of seeing my city for the first time from this point of view, the relationships formed across industries, the sense of being trusted with knowledge that felt important. Those things were real.
So was the unstated agenda.
The programs were designed to produce civic insiders. People who knew which phone to call. People who understood the informal architecture of local power well enough to navigate it on behalf of their employers. The credential said “community leader.” The subtext said “useful to the people who already run things.”
The Role They Were Training You For
There is a version of civic education that asks: how does this place work, and how can we make it work better for everyone in it?
And there is a version that asks: how does this place work, and how do I get cast in a role where decisions get made?
The Leadership programs were built on the second question. Which is something. Knowing how a city works is genuinely valuable. But that is a different thing than civic imagination. It is orientation to an existing system … not the capacity to envision a different one.
A Different Cohort Entirely
Here is what I keep thinking about.
What if this leadership cohort wasn’t corporate professionals being inducted into the existing civic structure … but creative practitioners bringing innovation, vision, and original, unconventional thought to the body politic?
Not to join the system, but to understand it. To see it clearly, name it honestly, and bring to it the one thing the existing programs never asked for and rarely got: genuine imagination about what else is possible.
Poets and architects. Choreographers and documentary filmmakers. Composers and novelists and game designers and muralists. People who spend their working lives solving problems that have no precedents, making forms that don’t exist yet, holding two contradictory things in mind long enough to find the third thing that resolves them.
What does a city look like to a choreographer? What does a budget process look like to a novelist? What does a zoning hearing look like to someone who has spent years learning to see what isn’t there yet?
These are not decorative or entertaining questions. These are civic ones.
What the Prefrontal Lobe Knows
Existing Leadership programs train participants to navigate. Navigation is a reactive skill. You assess the terrain and move through it.
Creative practitioners are trained to generate. To make the terrain. To ask not just where the path goes but whether this is the right damn mountain.
A civic education built for makers wouldn’t just expose them to how a city works. It would ask them to bring their full cognitive capacity to what they see… the curiosity, the tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to hold complexity without collapsing it into a slogan. It would treat their way of thinking not as a cultural amenity but as a civic resource.
It would place them in “the room where it happens” not because their employer paid for the ticket … but because their minds belong there.
What You Can Do Now
Rather than a “Leadership Class,” I would be inclined to refer to this civic initiative as a true “Creative Class.”
Of course, this program doesn’t exist. Yet.
But the people who would fill it do. Writers and composers and architects and filmmakers and designers and choreographers and makers of every kind, in every city, who have spent their careers making things that help the rest of the world see what it cannot yet imagine.
If that’s you … if this is landing somewhere true … join Res Creativa.
We are building a new cohort of creative practitioners. Not to be cast in a predetermined role but to imagine what the production called civic and democratic leadership can do.
Editor’s Note (2026): This essay was written during the earliest days of Res Creativa, when the project was first being imagined. It remains here as part of the organization’s founding story.
A version of this post was originally published on Substack, Apr 15, 2026
Banner image: Ervay and Elm, Dallas, TX, Photo 2012 by A. Vandalay, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
